As my plaster bust collection has evolved I've been looking more and more at contemporary fashion for inspiration. I'm specifically interested in designers who explore 'fashion as sculpture' and one guy doing this in bizarre and imaginative ways is Japanese designer Junya Watanabe

I was thrilled when I discovered these images and couldn't resist working with them. I was intrigued to see what would happen when I transposed these tight, stretched fabric shapes into solid plaster.

It was actually much harder than it looked to pull the fabric over the three-dimensional shapes and tie it on. All the objects kept rolling off and I felt like I needed 6 hands. I don't know how he did it with a live person underneath!

The bodice, or 'breastplate' more like, cast from a pill blister pack gives the costume a rather fantasy futuristic feel

Zoro was the first of the pair. When I took the cast out of the mould I actually pressed the stretched 'fabric' over the face as if it would give under pressure! The super-realism achieved by casting directly from real things can create some weird reactions!

I didn't realize until I made the first cast how much one would be able to' read' an actual face in the sculpture, despite most of the 3-dimensional information being obscured; I though the face would look more like an amorphous shape but in fact it seems we need hardly any visual clues in order for our brains to construct a face from what we're looking at.

They're a spooky pair!

I'm off to France for my usual summer jaunt - and hopefully some crazy 'objets' trawled from flea markets to inspire my next batch of busts. Having said that, I've just finished three Paris themed ones so the first job on my return will be to get those photographed and on the blog!

One thing I'll be missing of course is the London Olympics - but I got prepared for them well in advance with my Olympic Busts which will be on show at various London locations - hope people like them. Meanwhile, just need to work out how to get across London to catch our ferry now that the centre of town is completely cordoned off!! Sorry we'll be missing the action but also looking forward to hearing the odd sentence without the work 'olympics' in it.

1 comment:

It's really interesting this move towards Abstraction and making your own Lego now from pill packets. These two are super, I was thinking the other day about The Lone Rangers silver bullets, he obviously new something about casting too!!

Exhibition @ Harewood House, Yorkshire

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The back-story

This is a 'back-story' blog - a glimpse behind the scenes in my studio and an insight to the visual perspective which inspires my sculpture & design. And to see the 'front story' visit mywebsitewww.kathydalwood.com